Deep Dish by the Slice

Tuesday, April 25, 2017

I'm at that age now where it feels like everyone I know is
getting married.

To be fair to me though, in the past year and a half, two of
the cousins that I was closest with got married, one more got engaged, then one
of the three friends that I keep in regular touch with from school got married,
and finally two couples, all of whom I count among my closest friends from
college, got engaged.

I feel like even for someone my age that is kind of a lot of
important people at once.

When I tell people this their first question is inevitably,
are you jealous? Even Q asked me this though of course he meant it completely
as a joke. He knows I'm not.

I have to say though that I am very intimidated by the total
confidence that they seem to have in the idea.

I am totally amazed that they can sit and plan all of the
finer details of a wedding ceremony and a party, engage themselves in long
discussions about the venue and the guest list and the food, all based on the
solid foundation of the idea that this wedding is actually going to happen on
the scheduled date just as planned. I am in awe of their unhesitant happiness,
their honest to god faith in the institution of marriage, the surety that they
have in themselves that they will be a good partner.

When I was a little bit younger I might have made a snide
comment about how people are more interested in planning a party than thinking
about a marriage. But again to be fair to myself that’s because I probably hadn’t
seen a couple that I felt actually wanted to be together. Marriage to me seemed
only slightly better than bilateral indentured servitude. I figured (definitely
for cultural reasons) that it was kind of a thing that people only ever did
because others expected them to, and then you found someone that seemed
tolerable, and then you figured the rest of it out from there.

But I've learned that in this way, just as I've learned in many other ways, that the rest of the world works very differently from my family.

When I see how happy my friends all are, it is completely
undeniable that they are doing this for themselves, because they actually want
to, because they are totally confident that it will work out, or at the very
least, the risks don’t scare them enough from the idea of wanting to be
together forever.

And THAT does make me a little bit jealous. Because the idea
of marriage totally terrifies me, still, even now, even after having met the
happiest married couple I’ve ever seen, who have raised the person who is more
patient, more forgiving, more concerned with my mind and my well-being, and more
loving towards me than anyone I could ever hope for. Someone who, when I
expressed this fear, did not meet it with anger or take it personally, but
instead responded with more patience, more understanding. Yet I still fear. I
still fear. I still fear.

I want to be the kind of person who definitely wouldn’t break
down and question everything suddenly and erratically when picking out a wedding cake. The person that I hope to end up with someday definitely deserves to inspire that level of confidence more than anyone else.

But I don’t know if I will ever be that way. I’m going to be a wavering,
unsure, self-conscious wreck until the day I die, and I don’t see that changing
anytime soon. But, God, if there is one thing that I get to be sure about, if
there’s one thing that I don’t lose sleep over when and if it happens, please, please
let it be this.